Kernel module inactive by default?

["Hans-J. Ullrich" <hans.ullrich@loop.de>]

Hi all, 

I discovered a strange behaviour since some time. Maybe someone can explain 
it:

I am running an Acer Crystal Eye Cam ( 5986:0102  
Acer Crystal Eye webcam), and the cam is running fine (driver is uvcvideo). 
Lucview is working, and kopete shows video, when I am in the settings menu. 

But I am wondering, why the driver is always incative (green led is off), when 
I am not running any application, which it is directly accessing (like xawtv, 
kopete or whatever)?

Whenever I am starting one of these applications, the green led is on, I get a 
picture/video, but when I leave it, the green led gets off. This means for me: 
The driver is now inactive! In the past, I could never see this behaviour, the 
green led was always on.

Might this be the reason, why camorama, kdetv or other video-applications 
cannot access to /dev/videoX ?

The access rights are of course set correctly, running as root gets no success 
either.  

So, is this normal? If yes, why? If not, how can I fix it?

This is the output of lsmod:

v4l1_compat            12932  2 uvcvideo,videodev
v4l2_compat_ioctl32     9296  1 videodev

Thank you for any information.

Regards

Hans